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There’s trepidation in farm country this week as the Municipal Property Assessment Corp. mails out property assessment notices.

The price of farmland has gone hog wild in recent years. That has farmers worried about what the MPAC assessments will mean for them.

Across the province, the value of agricultural land rose by 16 per cent on average over the past four years, according to MPAC data based on farmland sales. In the City of Ottawa, prices increased between 11 and 41 per cent.

In the rural areas east of Ottawa, prices have risen between 40 and 55 per cent, among the highest in the province, said Réjean Pommainville, the Ontario Federation of Agriculture director for Prescott, Russell, Stormont and Glengarry.

Tax increases will be phased in over four years, but farmers will be facing an additional cost pressure, said Pommainville, who operates a 200-acre cash crop farm.

“It’s going to affect the cost of production."

In some other areas, farmland prices have moderated or fallen this year as commodity prices fell. Beef, pork, soybean, wheat and corn prices are declining and that has put downward pressure on the price of land, said Debra Straathof-Pretty, an Ontario Federation of Agriculture director whose region includes Ottawa and Renfrew and Lanark counties.

She is concerned MPAC assessments no longer reflect reality. “In commodity markets, the good times don’t last for long.”

MPAC vice-president and chief operating officer Rose McLean said farmland prices are assessed every four years, whether it’s at a high point or a low point in the real estate market. The data include only land that is sold from one farmer to another.

The tax rate won’t necessarily reflect the increases in assessment value, she said.

“The tax amount is determined by the revenue requirement of each municipality.”

Prices have risen proportionally faster in Eastern Ontario compared to other regions as farmers search for relative bargains, said McLean.

In Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry, the price of land “jumped dramatically” due to a shortage of land for sale, selling for between $7,000 and $17,000 an acre, according to a 2014 survey of farmland prices by Re/Max.

Tile-drained land in West Carleton sold for between $8,000 and $10,000 an acre, rising to $12,000 around North Gower, Winchester, St. Isidore, Casselman and Maxville. About 80 per cent of buyers want to buy land to add to existing operations, according to Re/Max.

Meanwhile, the high price of farmland is changing the rural landscape as farmers move to cut down woodlots to make more room for crops. Peever knows some farmers who have opted to clear their land rather than buy more.

“It’s cheaper to cut the wood off it,” he said.

Pommainville said some farmers are reclaiming land that was abandoned 40 or 50 years ago.

In 2013, when the price of land soared to $20,000 an acre in Chatham-Kent, south of London, the clearing of farm woodlots sparked controversy, as did a proposed bylaw to halt the cutting. Forest cover in the area at the time was estimated to be as little as four per cent.

“If there’s word that a (clear-cutting) bylaw is about to be created, people go out and clear land,” said Eric Thompson, executive director of the Ontario Woodlot Association.

Last month, South Nation Conservation released an analysis of aerial photography of Eastern Ontario from 2008 and 2014 that looked at forest coverage. In 2014, forest cover was 28.1 per cent. Between 2004 and 2014, almost 13,000 acres of forests were lost to development, farming, solar farms and forestry, a 4.1-per-cent decrease in forest cover and nearly one million trees lost every year, according to the report.

Allen Earle, a farmer and real estate agent who specializes in farms, doesn’t see a situation like Chatham-Kent’s happening in Eastern Ontario. “You won’t see woodlot after woodlot being cleared. The land can be shallow or stony. There’s a lot of reasons why the economics won’t support that kind of land clearing.”

There are 169,000 woodlots in Ontario, but only eight per cent of forested land in the province is privately-owned, said Thompson.

“The pressures on landowners to clear forests for agricultural uses and urban expansion are enormous,” he said. “Forests require management, and there’s no money in it.”